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Full-Text Articles in Commercial Law
Debt, Accelerated Depreciation, And The Tale Of A Teakettle: Tax Shelter Abuse Reconsidered, Theodore S. Sims
Debt, Accelerated Depreciation, And The Tale Of A Teakettle: Tax Shelter Abuse Reconsidered, Theodore S. Sims
Faculty Scholarship
For more than thirty years a consuming preoccupation of the income tax has been the control of "tax sheltered" investments. Of most widespread concern have been acquisitions, financed by debt, of assets that enjoy some sort of "tax-preferred" treatment, most commonly some advantageous form of depreciation. Tax-favored treatment has been conferred on many productive assets through deliberate congressional action. Nevertheless, debt-financed acquisitions of those very same assets have been regarded as exploiting the available tax benefits in ways that seemed "abusive" and have widely been regarded as "bad." This perplexing, fundamentally self-contradictory state of affairs has levied constant demands on …
Tax Characterization Of International Leases: The Contours Of Ownership, William W. Park
Tax Characterization Of International Leases: The Contours Of Ownership, William W. Park
Faculty Scholarship
Pondering the human tendency to pay dearly for short-lived adornments, Shakespeare asks a question of interest to lawyers as well as poets: "Why so large cost, having so short a lease.. .? The lawyer's analysis of the issue might begin with a scenario set in an imaginary world in which the tax effects of business transactions are determined by their legal form rather than their economic substance. In such a world, each of two companies decides to build a new factory. One acquires the land outright, paying in several installments. The other enters into a shortterm lease at a very …